Modern communication systems enable a user to communicate with one or more other users simultaneously over a network utilizing a conference scenario feature. During a conference scenario, the participants may use various types of communication devices in order to be able to speak to all of the other participants and to be able to hear when any of the participants speak. In a conference scenario, audio packets may be transmitted over the network to each of the user's listening devices containing the speaking user's speech segments and also containing actual background noise that may be present in each user's local environment. In order to reduce the number of audio packets that are transmitted and to conserve wasted bandwidth, communication systems may employ silence suppressors which reduce the number of packets transmitted when the user is not speaking, and produce silent segments between speaking segments at a listening user's device. The silent segments may be perceived as a disconnection of the conference call, since a listening user may not hear any noise on the client's listening device.
Commonly, a background noise or comfort noise may be generated during the silent segments to prevent the perception of a disconnection. The comfort noise may be hard-fixed to run at a listening user's device at a predefined level and may be initiated upon the detection of an absence of speech and terminated upon the detection of a new speech segment. Typically, the comfort noise level is constant so that it does not sound different after each speech segment and may also be fixed to a low level to avoid sounding too loud for users employing a headset device or handheld device. The fixed comfort noise level may be unpleasant to a listening user due to the jarring transition between speech segments and comfort noise, and the fixed level may not be effective in a wide variety of listening devices, some of which may require higher or lower comfort noise levels depending on their type.